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As far as commercial holidays go, Record Store Day is a virtuous occasion, because recorded music is among the wonders of the world, and the survival of physical media is crucial to the future of art. In the realm of jazz, the holiday’s hero is the producer Zev Feldman, who is responsible for a long and transformative run of releases from previously unavailable archival sources. To mark the latest Record Store Day (April 18th), working with a variety of labels, he has brought forth treasures that both deepen the history of jazz and expand the art form’s imaginative range. Three of the new sets (also available on CD and via digital download on April 24th) offer revelatory experiences of musicians whom I’ve been listening to for half a century—Cecil Taylor, Ahmad Jamal, and Joe Henderson. Delightful old recordings are rediscovered year in and year out, but it is rare for new entries in extensive discographies to feel instantly canonical.

The albums by Jamal and Henderson are from the nineteen-seventies, a time when jazz was in crisis—and their performances, both recorded in concert at the same venue (Chicago’s Jazz Showcase), present personal responses to the artists’ own situations and to the state of the music at large. As for Taylor’s recording, from the late sixties, it defines a bold advance in jazz that nevertheless reconnects with the music’s traditions.

Ahmad Jamal, “At the Jazz Showcase: Live in Chicago”
Resonance Records

Jamal started his recording career in 1951 with a style of piano playing so unusual that it was often grossly misunderstood and underestimated (including, in 1958, in the pages of The New Yorker). Eschewing the profusion and complexity of the era’s bebop pianists (foremost, Bud Powell), Jamal played sparely, creating arrangements for trios that served as backdrops for his improvisations of stark strokes and elegant gestures, sharp punctuations and witty melodic distillations. He neither accompanied other soloists nor had wind-instrument sidemen in his band. But, by the mid-sixties, Jamal’s style changed. Working with a new, looser generation of drummers, he went from restrained to overflowing, playing denser and more emphatically expressive solos, albeit without sacrificing wit or melody. That transformation came at a cost: in the late fifties, Jamal had enjoyed great commercial success, but in the next decade his popularity waned. The trouble wasn’t his alone. Rock was supplanting the show-tune-based Great American Songbook—Jamal’s prime source—as the musical mainstream, and by the seventies popular jazz was heavily tinged with “fusion” elements (electric instruments, borrowings from rock and R. & B.) that often came at the expense of improvised solos. Jamal acceded to the trend and made several electric-based albums in pop modes that ranged from funk to easy listening. But the new album, “At the Jazz Showcase: Live in Chicago,” features live performances from March of 1976 that sound like a revolt against commercial concessions.

Classic American pop songs figure in the album, which also starts with an original composition by Jamal, “Ahmad’s Song.” Like many of the numbers here, it opens with a florid, rhapsodic piano introduction, before the drummer Frank Gant (with whom he’d been playing for a decade) and the bassist John Heard join in and kick things into high gear. What follows is an electrifying outburst of energy, as Jamal pushes the tempo, pulls it back to cascading cadenzas, tosses in quotes from other jazz and pop tunes, unleashes carillons of thunder. The second track, Antônio Carlos Jobim’s bossa-nova “Wave,” features a similarly dazzling virtuosic variety of phrases and riffs—a skipping and rocking eight-note motto that brings cheers from the audience, rapid two-handed chopping figures up the keyboard, crashing dissonances, swirl and bluster, lyrical whispers. Jamal’s exuberant solos give rise to a wondrous, paradoxical divergence: he flaunts a distinctive art of decomposition, breaking melodies down into small motifs that he both obsessively repeats and cleverly varies, yet he also keeps melody central, punctuating the improvisations with recognizable fragments of the basic tune, like signposts amid his free associations.

Fans of Jamal’s spare and firmly arranged recordings may struggle to recognize him in the teeming exuberance of this album. What unifies the two modes is the precision of Jamal’s discrete musical gestures, and his art of contrasts—how he moves in both periods, with jolting abruptness, from whispers to roars, from touches to torrents and back. If his early recordings isolate these gestures and surround them with musical space, separating the foreground of his piano from the background of his rhythm arrangements, the new recording brings background and foreground crashing together. To borrow an analogy from visual art, the finish of paint on the earlier recordings is thin, close to the canvas; here, it’s built up thickly. If there’s something Mondrian-like in his earlier, starker sense of musical geometry, at the Jazz Showcase he paints over the sharp lines with a van Gogh-esque impasto. In recent years, Feldman has put out three great albums of Jamal’s nineteen-sixties live recordings that chart the pianist’s transition to these more expansive styles. The new release marks the fullest flowering of them that I’ve heard.

Joe Henderson, “Consonance: Live at the Jazz Showcase”
Resonance Records

Henderson’s career launched later than Jamal’s but bore certain similarities. In the early sixties, Henderson, a tenor saxophonist, emerged as a modernist on the edges of mainstream jazz, where fervent but finger-snapping hard bop met the avant garde. He recorded with such illustrious musicians as Eric Dolphy, Andrew Hill, Woody Shaw, Lee Morgan, Horace Silver, Grant Green, and John Coltrane’s longtime bandmates McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones. In the early seventies, Henderson released such tough-minded albums as “At the Lighthouse” and “In Japan” but also made commercially tinged, fusion-based recordings (such as “Black Narcissus” and “Canyon Lady”). At the time of the Chicago gig, in February, 1978, he hadn’t been in the studio as a bandleader in nearly three years.

Like just about every major tenor saxophonist of his generation, Henderson was influenced by Coltrane, but Henderson absorbed that influence and transformed it into a mark of his own originality. He took on essential elements of Coltrane’s sound—the long low-note honks and growls and high-pitched screeches and wails—and he was inspired by Coltrane’s vehemence, how his energies from deep within seemed to burst out with reckless, self-revealing fervor. Yet where Coltrane is a natural complexifier, piling chords on chords and notes on notes and creating colossal intricacies even within jaunty phrases, Henderson is a simplifier, planing the harmonic field in order to dash ahead all the more ebulliently. Coltrane builds vertically, layering and intertwining the music into elaborately interlocking spirals; Henderson hurls out details and dashes through them, creating sonic landscapes for his relentless improvisational travels.

Notably, the first track on the new album, “Mr. P.C.,” is a Coltrane composition, an assertive romp that, a minute and a half in, already conjures a sense of having gone far fast. With buzzing and droning, wild high rasps and moans, fragmented and juddering phrases, roars and screams and split notes, beelike buzzing and hectic squalling, Henderson offers the sound-world of the avant-garde underpinned by songful riffs and a foot-stomping beat. At times, as in his solo on his own composition “Inner Urge,” these sound-shredding elements reach strident extremes untempered by thee rhythmic accompaniments of his bandmates—the pianist Joanne Brackeen, the bassist Steve Rodby, and the drummer Danny Spencer—who are keenly responsive partners in the high-spirited clamor.

Henderson also offers one of the most beautiful and unusual renditions of the classic modernist ballad “ ’Round Midnight” that I’ve ever heard. It starts with his unaccompanied solo saxophone; then, joined by the rest of the quartet, he bumps the tempo up to a bouncy stride and offers solos with thrilling velocity and intensity to match. He ends another ballad, “Good Morning Heartache,” with another free and unaccompanied cadenza that dives into the wild zone, buzzing and yodeling. I’ve listened to many of Henderson’s albums from early in his career through the seventies, and long beyond. The new one is what I’d play for a Martian who wanted to know the power and the freedom of Henderson’s art.

Cecil Taylor Unit, “Fragments: The Complete 1969 Salle Pleyel Concerts”
Elemental Music

Taylor, of course, is one of the prime creators of so-called free jazz, a genre largely defined by atonality, collective improvisation, ferocious intensity, and the absence of a foot-tapping beat. But the idiom’s paradoxes—and its deep roots in classic jazz—are reflected in the title of his composition “Fragments of a Dedication to Duke Ellington,” which fills the entirety of this two-disk album. The recording, from Paris on November 3, 1969, is by a quartet featuring two of Taylor’s longtime collaborators, the drummer Andrew Cyrille (who’s still active and recording) and the alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, along with Sam Rivers—one of the prime free-jazz recording artists in his own right—on tenor and soprano saxes and flute. The group offers two separate performances of the same composition—one, from the afternoon set, and the other, from the evening. This is the first official release of the recordings, and hearing them is an ecstatic experience.

I’ve long thought of the great jazz musicians synesthetically, in terms of their implicit connections to other art forms. Taylor’s music has always struck me as bound with dance, for reasons that also help explain his deep connection to Ellington, beyond the similarities of their percussive piano styles and their efforts to create original group sounds. For much of Ellington’s career, his band was a dance band, playing in night clubs and at social gatherings which weren’t principally concerts, and his compositions and arrangements were designed to set people in motion. Taylor didn’t make his career playing for dancers (though he did, in 1990, accompany a choreographed dance performance), yet his music does much the same thing, in radically different ways that take a bit of teasing out. Taylor’s way of playing the piano evokes dance in its gestures, and he provokes the same effect from the entire group. At the keyboard, he doesn’t swing; he lurches and glides, leaps and thrusts and spins and jitters, unleashing torrents of notes at astounding speed, fragmenting his rhythms to their vanishing point. His free music manages to be intensely rhythmic nonethelesss, in a way that’s radically different from the familiar beats of foot-tapping jazz. His performances channel metabolic undulations, akin to breathing with the whole body, and they are liable to get even listeners in their seats, at home, moving along. By the end, a listener should feel not only exhilarated but also exhausted.

My only complaint about the new album is that the two versions of “Fragments”are presented in reverse chronological order—starting with the evening set, which runs forty-nine minutes, and followed by the afternoon one, which is nearly twice as long. The shorter version, heard first on the first disk, feels rushed; though the musicians are all inspired, the results feel somewhat unvaried. In the longer one, the quartet’s members have more solos and develop a wider range of moods, revealing the great variety that emerges from their relatively homogeneous and immensely complex style. It’s a grand, rich, and mighty experience—and the shorter rendition suggests that the quartet knew that they couldn’t top it or match it in such short order.

What the briefer version also lacks is the sense of stamina, of athleticism that’s at the heart of Taylor’s music. He was lean and in shape, as the album’s booklet and cover photos attest, and he remained so throughout his career. (I saw him, when he was nearing eighty, play with whirlwind thunder for an hour and a half, without interruption, amid the holy racket of his fifteen-to-twenty-piece big band.) Taylor’s music has a heroic, monumental sense of time; it occupies time the way that a staged spectacle occupies space, and, as a result, the forty-nine-minute evening set of “Fragments” seems slight, whereas the hour-and-a-half-plus version, for all its mind-wrenching and body-seizing intensity, fits properly in its dimensions. Taylor, who’d already made eleven studio albums, starting in 1956, hadn’t recorded any since October, 1966. As great as many of them are– notably, the last of that group, “Conquistador!”—this Paris concert is the earliest recording yet released to reveal the vast scope of his ambitions. ♦

By 1983, Tom Arndt was a few years into a project that consumed most of his life: creating a photographic portrait of American culture. He had lived through the hippie era, and at the dawn of the nineteen-eighties he thought he detected something new. Arndt had travelled to New York to photograph the 1981 ticker-tape parade that celebrated the release of American hostages held in Iran, which had coincided with the Inauguration of President Ronald Reagan. He told me that he remembers thinking, “This is a new kind of patriotism. This is not anti-Vietnam protests, or the generation that I was part of. This is balls-out ‘God Bless America.’ ”

Arndt decided to follow the national mood wherever it led, making portraits that found a home not in the world of journalism but in that of fine art, on the walls of galleries and museums. He returned to the Midwest, where he had grown up, and set about documenting the lives of farmers, homeless people, Holocaust survivors, politicians. He was living in Minneapolis when he heard about something interesting happening in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn, in the suburb of Bloomington, and decided to drive over with his cameras, a pair of Contax RTSIIs. A television-news crew captured the scene. “The lure of the movies drew them in droves,” the reporter said. “They were all hoping to land an extra role in a new movie called ‘Purple Rain,’ starring Prince, the Minneapolis rock star who has achieved national prominence.”

“Purple Rain,” the film and the associated album, arrived the next year; combined, they established Prince as something more than a mere rock star. He was suddenly a national obsession, a polarizing figure who was transformed, over the decades, into a consensus favorite. Especially since his death, a decade ago this week, he has come to be widely and rightly regarded as one of the greatest figures in the history of popular music. But, on that day in Bloomington, Arndt encountered not a frenzied mob but a calm and quiet group, eager to be photographed by the people working for the film-production company, and willing, in some cases, to be photographed by him. (Arndt was careful to tell everyone that he had no connection to Prince.) He shot portraits for a few hours and then went home, feeling that they hadn’t turned out terribly well. “I did my best, and I didn’t think much of them,” he said. “If I had a delete button, I probably would have erased them—that’s why I’m grateful to be shooting film.”

He added the negatives to his voluminous collection and kept working, and didn’t even think to print contact sheets until last year, when he found himself curious about his afternoon among the “Purple Rain” hopefuls. He’d shot mostly closeups, emphasizing the faces and deëmphasizing the clothes, in hopes that the portraits would look timeless. But, when he looks at the images now, he is struck by how vividly they evoke 1983. “They are specifically anchored in that moment,” he said.

A number of Arndt’s subjects appear to be trying to dress like Prince, though this is not an easy assignment. On the record sleeve of his 1978 début album, “For You,” Prince poses shirtless in bed, with an acoustic guitar and his hair teased into an afro, like a seductive folk singer. But, in the years that followed, he borrowed from punk and New Wave, mixing jackets and trenchcoats with frills and lace and lingerie, slipping between styles and identities. The critic Nelson George, in an insightful and provocative book, “The Death of Rhythm & Blues,” published in 1988, wrote that not everyone enjoyed Prince’s slipperiness, and suggested that, by emphasizing racial ambiguity (for instance, through his “consistent use of mulatto and white leading ladies” in films and music videos), Prince “aided those who saw blackness as a hindrance in the commercial marketplace by running from it.” Nowadays, of course, no one questions Prince’s place in the pantheon of Black musicians, but in order to appreciate the magnitude of his imagination and his influence it’s important to remember how controversial he once seemed, and how confusing.

Arndt tried, above all, to be respectful of those young people gathered in the parking lot. “There were kids who were just in their underwear, and I didn’t photograph them,” he said. But his image of a young woman in hot pants, wielding a whip, captured the exuberant spirit of dress-up that predominated that day. The words “Prince” and “Purple Rain” evidently summoned forth a wide range of aspiring actors, and a wide range of styles; taken as a whole, they constitute a jumbled-up tribute to a performer who loved to keep people guessing. To one guy, dressing the part meant a sleek, light-colored sports coat. To another, it meant a fresh Jheri curl and a popped-collar jean jacket—state-of-the-art R. & B. mixed with old-fashioned rock and roll. One woman epitomizes punk chic in a beret and a spiked necklace. Two others are carefully layered and accessorized, perfecting the kind of theatrical eighties glamour that more or less disappeared with the end of the decade.

At one point in the afternoon, Arndt entered the hotel to find a bathroom, and bumped into Prince himself, accompanied by his bodyguard Charles (Big Chick) Huntsberry, who made Prince look even tinier than he was. But mainly he remembers the afternoon as a low-key get-together, despite the fashion. He has watched “Purple Rain” more than once, and never recognized anyone from the parking lot, which felt less like a would-be movie set and more like a local hangout. “I think that these portraits are very Minnesota,” he told me. “It’s not that they’re humble. They’re just quieter. If this was in Brooklyn, this casting call, it would be different.”

One night in August, 2024, I sat on my bed in Los Angeles with three laptops and an iPhone, hoping to buy tickets for the Oasis reunion tour—the band’s first live venture since it abruptly broke up, in 2009. As it neared 1 A.M., I got in position, hovering my fingers over track pads. I’d selected a different tour date on every device, thinking I’d have better luck if I spread out the requests across several cities. When Ticketmaster’s website spit back my place in the queues, two of them (Manchester’s Heaton Park and London’s Wembley Stadium) appeared unquestionably hopeless, judging from the tens of thousands of people ahead of me. The queues inched along in the course of a few anguished minutes. Then seat maps miraculously popped up on two devices: I had somehow wriggled my way through thousands-strong lines for the tour opener in Cardiff, Wales, and the then final date in Edinburgh, Scotland. Desperate, I attempted to snap up four reasonably priced seats in either stadium, barely registering where I was clicking. I’d select seats and hit “checkout,” as fast, it seemed, as humanly possible, only for the site to tell me that they were no longer available. With every second that elapsed, my chances of securing anything tanked further.

Emotional whiplash is a feature, not a bug, of the modern ticket-buying experience. In recent years, purchasing concert, theatre, and sporting-event tickets has morphed into a byzantine humiliation ritual, with opaque fees—“service,” “order processing”—often tacking on up to twenty per cent more to base ticket prices. As the cost of living and inflation have surged, these types of live events have increasingly become playgrounds for élite V.I.P. experiences, with ordinary people shelling out the equivalent of a rent payment to catch a glimpse of their favorite artist.

Exasperated fans have long directed their ire at the ticketing platforms themselves, particularly Ticketmaster and Live Nation, two live-entertainment-industry behemoths that merged in 2010, when Live Nation, a concert promoter, artist manager, and venue owner bought the ticket-sales site Ticketmaster. The corporation’s management arm represents hundreds of artists, including some of the biggest stars on earth, and offers musicians incentives which include performing at the venues it owns. Reports indicate that it also commands exclusive contracts at fifty-three out of sixty-eight of the largest arenas in the U.S., which, in 2022, raked in eighty-three per cent of gross revenue across all arenas in the country (more than $2.4 billion). Every road, it seems, leads back to Live Nation-Ticketmaster.

Last Wednesday, the jury in a federal antitrust case found that Live Nation and Ticketmaster had operated as a monopoly, a decision that vindicated long-suffering ticket buyers. “I can’t wait for the judge to get hit with a $45 ‘Verdict Convenience Fee,’ a $30 ‘Gavel Processing Fee,’ and an $80 ‘Digital Print-at-Home Ruling Surcharge,” a Reddit user cracked. (After the verdict, Live Nation said in a statement, “The jury’s verdict is not the last word on this matter. Pending motions will determine whether the liability and damages rulings stand.”) But the verdict also confirmed something that fans were already intimately acquainted with: dysfunctional ticketing systems exploiting their passion. Therein lies the paradox: these maddeningly bureaucratic platforms have tapped into a business so lucrative—the creation of high-profile communal rites—that it literally has no bottom.

Surprisingly, even as consumers are made to jump through more and more hoops by ticketing platforms, they appear willing to further open up their wallets. The sadism of this dynamic surfaced during a shocking moment in trial proceedings last month, when attorneys presented exchanges between Live Nation employees: ticketing workers boasted about how live-entertainment fans were “so stupid” to pay the astronomical fees that the corporation had set for events. “Robbing them blind baby,” one wrote in an internal Slack message. “That’s how we do.” (In the trial, Live Nation argued that these were private, “irrelevant” remarks and thus should be excluded as evidence in the proceedings.) Last year, Live Nation raked in $25.2 billion in total revenue—as much as a nine-per-cent jump from 2024.

Ticketmaster was founded, in the mid-nineteen-seventies, as a computerized seat-locater and ticket generator, and went on later to share a cut of its discretionary “service fees” with regional venue promoters, as a way to secure their business. In 1991, Ticketmaster had become a big enough player that it acquired Ticketron, then its fiercest competitor. Ten years later, it hashed out a ticketing deal with the broadcasting company Clear Channel; in 2005, Clear Channel’s entertainment unit spun off as Live Nation. (The Wall Street Journal described how Live Nation was “widely viewed as a drag on the parent company’s performance.”) Ticketmaster’s contract with Live Nation expired in 2008. But, rather than competing with each other, the two joined forces. The Department of Justice cleared the way for the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger the following year.

In 2010, during one of the heavyweight speeches that the SXSW music conference, in Austin, Texas, often presents as part of the festival, Christine A. Varney, the former Assistant Attorney General for the D.O.J.’s antitrust division, stressed that the government had rigorously investigated the Ticketmaster-Live Nation deal before green-lighting it. “I understand that people view Ticketmaster’s charges, and perhaps all ticketing fees in general, as unfair, too high, inescapable, and confusing,” she said. “I also understand that consolidation has been going on in the industry for some time, and the resultant economic pressures facing local management companies and promoters. Those are meaningful concerns, but many of them are not antitrust concerns. If they come from a lack of effective competition, then we hope to treat them as symptoms as we seek to cure the underlying disease.”

In 2017, the BBC program “Backstage Pass” followed the former Oasis band member Liam Gallagher around at a few of his solo shows. One video clip showed Gallagher—a shaggy Gen X-er known for his crotch-forward gait and penchant for wearing parkas zipped up practically to his eyeballs—preparing himself a cup of tea backstage. In Oasis’s nineties heyday, Gallagher explained, he had four people to make his pre-show tea, including “a little geezer doing the kettle.” Not so much anymore. “No one buys records these days,” he said. “Now you gotta do it yourself . . . ’cause these fucking little smartasses download fucking tunes for nish,” meaning zilch. Pausing briefly to continue stirring his drink, he added, “Then they wonder why there’s no real rock-and-roll stars around.”

Gallagher’s profane monologue went viral on account of its absurdity—four people on payroll to brew a single cup of tea? But the rocker’s screed contained a truth, one that has substantially shaped the contemporary ticket-buying panopticon. After listeners drifted away from buying physical releases such as CDs and vinyl, starting in the two-thousands, touring has become a critical means for artists to earn their incomes.

A sobering Citi report noted that in 2017, the same year that Gallagher raged about his tea, the music industry generated forty-three billion dollars in revenue, of which artists saw only twelve per cent, mostly from touring. Citing a Billboard report, Business Insider noted that U2, the most handsomely paid group that year, saw about ninety-five per cent of their income come from touring in 2017. Present-day streaming giants such as Spotify pay cents per stream—a pro-rata system that overwhelmingly benefits the artists raking in the highest number of total listens. The rise of streaming has compounded the importance of touring for artists—if groups can afford to tour at all.

The iridescent glare of social media has further turbocharged the concert industry’s dominance. In general, fans posting online, in 2026, has become a smorgasbord of aspirational boasting, in a turn away from a more modest form of life-style exhibitionism once derided as “humblebragging.” And the ubiquity of posts that take viewers on experiential journeys—such as “come with me” videos popularized by influencers on TikTok—has accelerated the feeling that one doesn’t exist in the world, digitally speaking, if one isn’t physically present at Justin Bieber’s Coachella set and documenting it on one’s phone.

We are living in a post-COVID culture, and since the world began reopening for mass gatherings in 2021, fans’ desire to partake in experience-driven travel has fuelled the demand for live events. In turn, the live-music industry has rocketed to revenues greater than anyone had imagined.

Back in my West Coast bedroom in August, 2024, I continued wrestling with the Ticketmaster seating charts. Why was I willing to go to such lengths for a concert lasting two hours? Yes, I yearned to be walloped by Oasis’s meaty nineties riffs, but that didn’t explain my demented inclination to put myself through this stress. Rather, I had become possessed by the impossibility of this cultural landmark—in which the two feuding Gallagher brothers had decided to finally quash their rivalry and perform shimmering music together again. The chance to witness the reunion had stoked my worst impulses: an irrational fear of missing out, a willingness to overextend myself financially, a penchant for annoying my then fiancé—now husband,—by adopting the band’s familiar turns of phrase (i.e., “maybeh,” “Biblical”).

Suddenly, Ticketmaster prompted me to enter my credit-card information. I had less than five minutes to choose the Oasis gig in Cardiff or Edinburgh. Considering the Gallagher brothers’ infamous history of holding grudges, I wasn’t entirely optimistic that the band would be able to stay together through Edinburgh, but they could probably keep it together for the début. Cardiff it was. Five hundred and thirty-four dollars later, four tickets for the inaugural show at Principality Stadium landed in my inbox. I dashed off a text to my brother, a fellow Oasis head, that I’d secured us and our partners four tickets to see them in a year’s time: “We’re going to the first gig lads!!!!!!”

I had bested truly dubious statistics: fourteen million people worldwide had tried to snag tickets for this tour. This outsized interest in Oasis had prompted Ticketmaster to employ “dynamic pricing,” which increases fees commensurate to real-time demand. (Oasis later said that they hadn’t consciously opted into dynamic pricing, and that it created an “unacceptable experience” for fans; when they announced dates in the U.S., South America, and Asia, the band’s team said that dynamic pricing would not be employed for those shows.) I was struck by a variable response to gouging: dynamic pricing had sparked a far bigger outcry abroad than in the U.S. If anything, other Americans I spoke with seemed pleasantly surprised with the cost of Oasis tickets across the pond versus what they’d pay closer to home, not unlike Swifties travelling for the European leg of the Eras Tour for a fraction of the price. Navigating extortionate ticketing systems in the name of experience has, apparently, become routine.

Efforts to curb Ticketmaster extend back to the nineties, when the grunge band Pearl Jam took on the ticketing platform in an effort to keep service fees down to ten per cent, on tickets costing no more than eighteen dollars. Ticketmaster, wanting to charge more, refused; Pearl Jam, then one of the highest-grossing bands in the U.S., cancelled their tour, a partnership with Ticketmaster. The band filed a complaint with the Justice Department alleging that Ticketmaster had acted as a monopoly, with little recourse for those trying to operate outside of it. Pearl Jam did not win the fight, but their case illuminated Ticketmaster’s behind-the-scenes tactics, particularly the exclusive contracts that make up the backbone of its business model.

Other artists, including Bruce Springsteen, have tussled with the concert leviathan. In 2010, Ticketmaster settled a Federal Trade Commission complaint alleging that the platform had used “deceptive bait-and-switch tactics” to drive Springsteen fans away from Ticketmaster’s face-value offerings and instead to its resale site, TicketsNow, which sold tickets at up to four times the original price. (Customers were refunded these inflated surcharges, and its secondary-resale sites were disbanded.) In 2022, several Swifties filed lawsuits against Live Nation, including one alleging that the company had allowed bots to crowd the general ticket sale for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, thus prohibiting fans from buying face-value tickets. (Ticketmaster cited a “staggering number of bot attacks” and unprecedented demand as the reasons for the snafu.)

The U.S. government then opened an investigation into the Swift ticket disaster, efforts which, in part, set the stage for the present-day antitrust trial. Thirty-nine states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government joined a lawsuit claiming that Live Nation had elbowed out practically all its competitors and stuck consumers with higher fees, going on to command eighty-six per cent of the total market for live entertainment. Live Nation disputed these charges, but conditionally settled with the D.O.J. in March, agreeing to pull back on service fees and pay a fine of two hundred and eighty million dollars. But the states decided to move forward with the trial, thus resulting in last week’s verdict.

Music-industry advocates and the public reacted with elation. “This is incredible legitimacy added to what I think a lot of people have thought are just a bunch of hippies and hipsters shouting about the corporation for the past year,” Scott Mohler, the executive director of the Maine Music Alliance, said in an interview with NPR. What comes next is murkier. Assuming the verdict stands, the parent company will likely have to pay damages, and perhaps divest from exclusive ticketing contracts at various venues. Yet the states’ ultimate goal—to dissolve Live Nation and Ticketmaster altogether—feels like a steep ask in a regulatory climate that’s historically friendly to such giants. The company has said that it intends to contest the decision. The pending March settlement, which would also involve the company divesting from up to thirteen U.S. amphitheatres, was described by Stephen Parker, the executive director of the National Independent Venue Association, in an interview with Rolling Stone, as not “even significant enough to call it a slap on the wrist.”

Moreover, it seems doubtful that the resolution will meaningfully bring down ticket prices, at least in the short term. Nothing about touring is becoming less expensive, and numerous past victories have not led to long-standing structural reform. In late March, the Guardian reported that, after a December, 2024, crackdown from the Federal Trade Commission stipulating more transparency behind unexpected “junk fees,” tacked onto hotel and live-event ticket charges—like Live Nation’s processing fees—Live Nation instead adjusted other fees to “offset the revenue loss,” according to a 2025 e-mail that Ticketmaster sent to an arena in Arizona. Yet scores of working- and middle-class people, perhaps spreading out payments across various credit cards and “buy now, pay later” services, continue to buy tickets.

For my part, I saved for nearly a year to travel abroad for the Oasis show. The more responsible move would have been to go down to the record store and pick up, say, Oasis’s LP “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory,” going for a small percentage of what I paid for a ticket. Then again, I wasn’t thinking of that in Wales, my voice cracking as I howled along with thousands of other fans to the rapturous anthem “Supersonic”: “I’m feeling supersonic, give me gin-and-tonic / You can have it all, but how much do you want it?” ♦

The latest in the Trumpite series of proposed oversized buildings—the previous one being a ballroom where the East Wing of the White House once stood, a project that a federal judge temporarily halted last Thursday, until an appeals court put his preliminary injunction on hold on Friday—is a so-called triumphal arch, though exactly what triumph so needs an arch is unclear. Standing at two hundred and fifty feet high, presumably for the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it would be more than twice as tall as the Lincoln Memorial, views of which it would block from its proposed site, near Arlington National Cemetery—where it would also overwhelm the simple graves of the fallen soldiers.

The plans for the arch were preliminarily approved last week by the Commission of Fine Arts, which is now completely inhabited by Donald Trump’s appointees, the previous members having stepped down or been fired for the crime of competence last year. The arch, designed by Nicolas Charbonneau, who leads Harrison Design’s Sacred Architecture Studio, in Washington, D.C., will feature a Las Vegas-style overload of gilded iconography, including a winged Lady Liberty, eagles, and, unusually for an American monument, lions. (Why not Siegfried and Roy’s tigers?)

When asked by a reporter last year whom the arch would be for, Trump said, “Me,” so, really, it might more properly be called the Arch of Trump. But there is, as always with Trump, a great deal of defiance and sheer Rodney Dangerfield-style obnoxiousness implicit in the plan. It is an act of mischief as much as of monument-making. It is a very arch arch.

Yet, bizarrely, given Trump’s recent, loud contempt for France’s military spirit and his assaults on the French for refusing to arrive, late and unconsulted, in his war on Iran, his arch is modelled on Parisian examples. The most famous of these, the Arc de Triomphe, which was originally Napoleonic in impulse but was very long-winded in execution, is only the largest. There is a better, far more handsome example of the type in the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, between the Tuileries and the Louvre, which is an actual Napoleonic monument, having been completed during Napoleon’s reign. The four ancient bronze horses that he stole from St. Mark’s Basilica, in Venice—which the Venetians had previously stolen from Constantinople, where they had been in residence after being taken earlier most probably from somewhere in classical Greece—once stood atop it, but they had to be returned after Napoleon’s fall, a roundelay of looting that perhaps suggests the dubious nature of all such triumphs.

The Arc de Triomphe that everyone knows sits on the Étoile, now called the Place Charles de Gaulle, and, though it was originally commissioned after the successful Napoleonic battle of Austerlitz, in 1805, construction on it was halted for a long time by the not insignificant fact that Napoleon had started losing battles about as decisively as they have ever been lost. Only decades later, when the agony of those defeats had abated a little and had been replaced by some retconned glory, which brought Napoleon’s body back to its current tomb in the Invalides, was the arch completed, as a consolation prize for disgruntled imperialists. Both these arches, along with a few others in Paris, were, of course, based on Roman examples, of which the still surviving Arch of Septimius Severus is the most imposing, celebrating now forgotten Roman victories over Parthia—an empire that was partly located, rather notably, in what is now Iran.

But what’s really wrong with Trump’s arch isn’t something that is always wrong with victory arches but, rather, something that is always wrong with all the architecture of autocracy. It lacks the modesty of intelligent self-scruple; it is not the style but the scale that is most objectionable. It would be the largest such structure in the world, and its bigness is its point. It may be noted that Hitler wanted to build an arch in his imagined new Berlin, his “Germania,” also modelled on the Arc de Triomphe, and also bigger than any other arch, and also big for the sake of bigness alone.

There is all the difference in the world between the sublimation of self into a heritage and the amplification of the ego into a monument. In the center of Rome today, the gigantic glaring white monument to Victor Emmanuel II is almost universally regarded as a kind of kitsch joke, not because he wasn’t, in his way, an admirable king, who presided over the unification of Italy, but because the implicit insecurity of the then newborn Italian state is so evident in its appearance. (It even includes winged figures like the one that appears on the top of the Trump arch.) Bombast is as evident in architecture as it is in speech. If you really believe in something, including yourself, you don’t need to sing its praises quite so loudly.

The difference between classical choices and arbitrary colossalism is as important as the distinction between political premises and policy differences, and just as easily gets confused. With Trump, the scale and the haste and the egotism with which a thing is approached is not a side issue. It is the issue that capsizes all others. There is an uncrazy argument to be made for calling for the removal of the brutal Iranian regime. But there is no uncrazy argument to be made for choosing to go to war without a plan for the day after. There are uncrazy, if unsound, arguments for protectionist tariffs, but none for a policy of tariffs by tantrum. In the same way, when it comes to designing public buildings, there is a reasonable case to be made for classical grace but no rational case to be made for gigantism for its own sake, and for triumphalism without a triumph. “Me” is not a funny answer to a question of purpose. It is a graceless one. But Trump’s urge is toward gigantism, not grace. This is as true about his ballroom, which would measure some ninety thousand square feet, as it is about the proposed arch. It is, simply, un-American. It is even, in its derivative way, un-French, since the Parisian instances are, at least, right-sized for their place and their purpose. If it were ever to be built, future generations would dream of its demolition. Its injury to the democratic spirit is too large to contemplate, and would be too hard to look past, even from a distance. ♦